Despite the incidence of climate change scepticism amongst right-wing politicians in the United States and elsewhere, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Writing in the journal Utopian Studies in 2016, the Californian science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed that: "Climate change is inevitable - we’re already in it - and because we’re caught in technological and cultural path dependency, we can’t easily get back out of it ... It has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy."

The 20th conference of the European Utopian Studies Society will be held at Monash University’s Prato Centre in Tuscany from 1-5 July 2019. The conference theme will be Utopia, Dystopia and Climate Change and it will address the way utopianists have explored the eutopian and dystopian possible outcomes of anthropogenic global warming. As with all the Society’s conferences, papers on other aspects of utopias and utopianism will also be welcome. The guest of honour and keynote speaker will be Professor Darko Suvin, author of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. We welcome proposals for individual 20-minute papers, panel sessions where 3 or 4 speakers address a shared topic, and workshops where contributors address questions of practical activism.